Nice to meet you!

I'm Cole. I develop software for a living, and I also do it for fun in my free time. I write here about my personal projects, as well as creating tutorials to share the things I've learned.

Posts

  • Inventing a New Cryptid: Long Mary

    In this post, I want to share the story of a strange creature born from a bizarre alignment of white-knuckled fear, fatigue-fueled delirium, bullheaded creativity, a slightly-too-optimistic trust of technology, and yes - a camel-shaped snow drift. This is the story of Long Mary, a terrifying cryptid that captured my imagination (and my heart) last December.

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  • Thanksgiving Vessels

    We are all vessels.

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  • Muscle Tension, Humanity, and the Universe

    “Tension is our way of resisting the moment. It covers up our aliveness.”  -Tara Brach
    Muscle tension has become very familiar to me over the past several years. Almost constantly, at least some of my muscles are in a state of tension. Driven by anxiety, it’s my body’s way of trying to feel like it’s in control, trying to resist whatever dangers are out there (imagined or real). In a way, it helps me feel like I’m ready to react to any danger that approaches. But it also prevents me from enjoying the moment, from seeing new things, from getting rest. It is not a desirable way to live.

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  • Choosing a Game Engine

    When making a video game, deciding which game engine you are going to use is one of the first big choices you have to make, and it has a huge effect on the outcome of your project. Choosing an engine that’s a bad fit for your project can lead to things like dead ends, delays, extra expenses, and having to cut features. Because of the importance of this decision, you should have a good set of criteria to use when choosing an engine, and you should have some familiarity with the available options. In this article, I’m going to cover both of those points.

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  • Bludgeon Update: Color Palette Refinement

    One of my recent changes to Bludgeon (the game I’m developing) has been to refine the color palette. Up until this point, I haven’t had a good process for choosing colors. I basically just haphazardly picked out colors I liked. I tried to reuse colors as much as possible to keep the color count down, having read multiple places that too many colors can make pixel art look sloppy. However, I didn’t really have a way to keep track of the colors in my palette, so I’m pretty sure I ended up with too many similar colors.

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